Jacob Katz, by David Sorkin (ed.) Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model

Summary

This volume of essays is of signal importance for the study of European Jewish history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It sets out to test the commonplace that German Jewry first made the transition to modernity and therefore provided a model of cultural and religious adjustment for Jews elsewhere by examining the transformation of Jews in ten regions or countries: Russia, Galicia, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, France, Holland, Trieste, England and the United States. The ten studies ably discharge their narrowly focused task by exceeding it: they analyze their respective Jewries with a detailed command of the facts and an intellectual sophistication rarely seen in the study of Jewish history. The authors refuse to limit Jewish history to a history of politics (emancipation) and culture (assimilation) but instead understand such traditional subjects as Haskala and Reform within a broader framework of overall transformation (or 'modernization’). In consequence, the volume provides a challenging view of a period acutely in need of reassessment.

Jacob Katz introduces the volume by undermining the Germanocentric view that has dominated and distorted much of our thinking about European Jewish history. He argues that German Jewry does not provide us with a model for understanding what happened in other countries, but rather served as a model at the time which was accepted, rejected or modified, yet because of its very existence ineluctably exerted influence. His argument thus resembles one that has been made for ‘modernization' in general: other countries did not necessarily imitate the political revolution in France or the industrial revolution in England, but they could not fail to understand themselves in comparison to such powerful precedents. Katz asserts that German Jewry played this role because ‘Jewish modernization in Germany turned articulated’ (11); the Jews’ reference group was the articulate Geisteselite but the state also exercised ‘ideological supervision’. Since German Jewry's experience was ‘articulate’ it became 'mobile’.

The influence of the German Jewish model was greatest in Central Europe where German culture predominated and a reforming absolutist state ruled. Yet even here the existence of various differences (e.g., the lack of a middle class equivalent to the Geisteselite) meant that the model could be adopted piecemeal, and even then only in more moderate forms.